Monetize Your Photography Business

Speaker 1: profit from the beginning charge profitable prices from the beginning really knowing your numbers will actually give you the confidence to charge what you're worth hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it the career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in welcome back to the Sheil it podcast thank you for joining us Jane you are an award-winning photographer CEO of pixelo and an advocate for helping creative professionals thrive in the photography industry tell tell us what led you to launch your business and share with us what you do at pixelo there's a lot of things that led me to the launch of pixel so I've been a professional photographer for 14 years and prior to that I worked in Ogle for advertising and so I have seen a lot of changes within the photography space and it's great people can have a camera and a Facebook page but not necessarily their business education or like how to price yourself I've been mentoring photographers for a long time on pricing and running your business and how to effectively brand your business it was a one-on-one type of business I just saw the need in the industry for a platform that really was geared towards helping photographers price themselves helping them upsell in terms of the number of digital images and so that led me to create a platform that's called pixel which is a subscription for professional photographers to run their business as well as it's an education platform as well so a bit of an all-in-one nice I love that so if I'm a photographer can you walk me through how pixelo can help we see a lot of people emailing people and then using venmo or everything is very peace meal or even sending their images via Dropbox so what we've done is used a CRM where you can get leads from your website you can send emails you can send follow-up emails when they don't respond to you really easily and then you can send booking proposals which is questionnaires contracts take retainers accept payments and we also then have places where your clients can actually book you if you have a session on your website and you're like hey I do head shots on Fridays and your clients can go in and book directly through you and then after the shoot we have a gorgeous gallery for your clients for photographers clients where they can download the images but they also can buy professional albums greeting cards wall art lots of different things prints rather than having to go download the images and then figure out where they have to print them it's all in one and our platform we built it so it can be used on your phone on your iPad or on your desktop so photographers are really busy they are trying to juggle many things like all entrepr rurs are but having something that they can send a contract on their phone while they're waiting for their next client Outdoors or waiting for your kid to put on their shoes you could do a lot actually during that time but yeah we just wanted to make it bring the technology a little bit more to what photographers need nowadays and that's great and I would think for clients too because we've all had the experience of having our photos taken and then maybe a year later you think oh I want to find those photos and then you go back and think oh do I still have access to the Dropbox and I think we've all been through that and it's so great that you help with the time management part of it I was waiting for my son to finish baseball practice yesterday and I did things on chat GPT and Google Docs and I did so much in 20 minutes and I thought anything that can help a busy entrepreneur get things done quickly is so helpful yeah um there there are other Gallery softwares that photographers can use but they often they Inspire them because there's a limit on them whereas ours are unlimited and you the reason why is clients want to go back and download the images or order more prints I've had clients come back five years later and order a print from me we want to be able to set it up in such a way that photographers are able to make more money or we have automated emails so they can send them a reminder nine months after their shoot and being like hey it's time for your family photo shoot so you don't have to get to the next person or the next photographer and you forgot who that person was because they sent it to you via Dropbox and you don't have that email so really trying to improve the client experience as well as well as make more money for photographers yeah and I love that you say that too because so often we get beautiful prints and then we think okay what was that thing I saw on Instagram where I can order the print and how do I find that and where do I order from and it's great that it's all in one yeah I've been primarily a newborn photographer and one of the things I always hear is oh I still haven't got my wedding album back from my photographer and that is because it's a very timec consuming job for picking images and people tend to give up it's great these albums are amazing but for the mom that wants an album of her family the options are to download the images and then get not great quality but this allows our clients to actually order the professional level album that they want without downloading uploading and they can just order the G album that way and know back and forth with a photographer and it taking five years they can just do it on their own again all to save people's time love that and as a working twin mom I so appreciate that I can't wait to take a look after cuz I have some family photos that I have not printed yet we are all thinking about setting ourselves for success in 2024 how do you keep an abundance mindset and why do you think it's essential for all business owners abundance mindset is so key for everybody and I'd actually done a lot of work on my abundance mindset I think had taken a course a few years ago and in our area I noticed there's a lot of photographers starting out I started getting a little bit of a negative mindset and then I realized wait I actually only need x amount of clients to run my business hypothetically I need a 100 families a year 60 of those are repeats but if I'm new let's say I'm a new photographer I need 100 clients I look around mine are families what I did was tried to find the statistics of how many kids were in the school district in my area it was like 5,500 and I was like okay and then I went to the other towns around me let's do half hour radio I was like there are a lot of families out there same thing with weddings people are like oh there's not many wedding how many weddings are there in your county in one year and how many can you realistically shoot 25 let's just say so then what that does is it's like you are looking at all of the families and then saying I actually only need 40 you definitely have to have an abundance mindset for any sort of B business but I think the abundance has to be tied into actually a bit of a reality check of what you actually need so you have to say oh yeah I see all these families but I need all 5500 no you don't run your numbers figure out how many clients you need to actually make your business and then are people repeat clients are people coming back each year are they new what is your attrition rate and you'll then figure out okay I've got these clients how can I keep them and that actually is so much easier to do than trying to find new clients so the abundance mindset is very key in running a business and I love how specific you drill down into your business like looking at the area and there are 5,500 families that doesn't put you in an abundance mindset towards what it is you do I don't know what would and you made it very specific to what you're doing not just oh there's a lot of families around that need photography you've looked at a specific area and that sets your mind on a path too yeah and from there what you can do is with the abundance mindset of okay there's 50,000 families within a half an hour radius of me and my ideal client is a working mom and she has more than one kid and she's busy how old is she name her and everything and then you can be like okay there's 5,000 of that how can I get to those 40 clients that I need of that and then you start looking around I named mine Jessica because I looked up the number one most popular name within that age and then I write Jessica and I'm not joking I think within the first month I think I got five jessicas and if I um but then also what the other popular names and start seeing what people are spending I was trying to bring myself out of a competitive Place race to the bottom M was significantly more and I was like okay people are spending $1,000 on a a week for their kid when they have an Annie or when they have this I'm much more valuable to people that value photography that have a business then a camp so I think that it's just really reframing it and as we're building out pixelo we do have a lot of coaching and Mastermind and all that stuff and we really trying and say do we get a lot of people no one's in my area no one's going to pay for this that's why I get very granular is you don't actually need every single person in your area to pay that amount you just need your number of clients so true speaking of abundance and raising prices how do you suggest business owners price to profit and have the confidence to raise their prices that is a massive Topic in itself and for photographers it's very difficult because you have a product and you're have a service-based business your end product is your albums prints or your digitals and then your service is the photo shoot a home organizer might come into your home and give you an hourly rate they have a lot less work behind the scenes than a photographer for example a photographer we've done a ton of time based studies because we have a profit calculator on our platform is for every 1 hour of a photo shoot there's 12 hours to 13 hours of backend work including running business editing and everything so you have to really drill down of like how long is it going to take me to do per client and then outline all of the costs that you will have and then go from there and then you can do a per client and one of the things is that you really have to figure out a way to profit from the beginning charge profitable prices from the beginning if you are new you can discount I do not like people doing things for free say photography you've got a great portfolio but you shouldn't be shooting for free you can be like hey I usually charge 750 but I need to go to this location for my website and so I'll give it to you for 50% off that's where your clients know the value of what you're getting no one really knows what goes into running a business the average restaurant profits 5% okay so when you're going in complaining about your dollar B and they're making 5 cents from it really knowing your numbers will actually give you the confidence to charge what you're worth don't get me wrong I've made mistakes pricing myself I did for first five years I did a baby's first year package that I wasn't by the way it should be baby's first year not when the kid is three and a half for the fifth one and I didn't charge a travel fee into New York City and I had my daughter and I was like whoa something's off so I redid my numbers and my clients that I then had to charge a travel fee to go into New York City because I was paying 50 bucks for parking I was traveling three hours and the tolls and everything and people would say you didn't charge a travel fee two years ago and I would write back and say in a nice way I had to review my numbers then these are my costs and this is what it cost me to go into the City versus you coming to my studio and every one of them was like okay yeah sure I'll book I think because sometimes it's busy business owners were afraid to talk about the cost we like to think they should just value my art obviously if they're asking questions about pricing they're not necessarily getting the value so they have to understand the costs and I'm not afraid of talking about costs yes and that's great it's really good for business owners plus the more you put out the offers at the higher price the easier it becomes and you put it into a relatable term for your clients where they think oh yeah if I had to pay $50 for parking and if I had to go through all of these things yeah have to pay babysitting now I would calculate it and so I'm basically making $30 an hour to drive to your location it wasn't a lot of money but it was putting value on my time and that's what you have to do it's like really put value on your time we tend to overlook even the little things and I overlooked the time in the car I overlooked the gas I overlooked everything and so if you can think okay if that person came to me for an appointment it's a lot cheaper for me my time I'm not traveling I'm not setting up I think there's an app called clockify and so you can actually over a week figure out exactly what you are doing in your business to see where you can basically raise your prices I love that I'm a fan of time blocking too so anything that helps you understand the time you're spending and I love how it relates to prices as well you believe in marketing Beyond social media I do too I believe it's a mixture of both how do you suggest business owners Market beyond their social media pages I don't recommend you do not have a social media page right I think you should have an Instagram I think you you don't have to have a Tik Tok if you're not really targeting that audience and if it's really too much for you the Facebook page definitely I would say the number one thing is to build an email list because you own that and so you can start marketing to it I basically you use Facebook and Instagram for awareness I've got repeat clients and mainly for my emails I have an VIP email list that basically have booked me or like they're my favorites that I email the first thing I would do is have your email list and so anything that you can do to grab their emails if you're starting out on Instagram and Facebook if you generate a lead or ask for the email to get on your list for a newsletter you can start it very basic and then the second and thing I would say is your website but also Google business profile which isn't social media but it is digital media highly recommend getting our Google business profile especially if you're a local business doesn't really matter if you're serving nationally but like it really helps if you're a local business to get reviews get your website found really higher and the last one is networking but I actually call it making business friends and actually one of my favorite networking SL business friends is the founder of twiniversity she's actually in New York and she has this educational platform for new moms of twins and we had started conversation when I was early I was reaching out I think she was running the Manhattan twins Club at the time and I was like I'm a twin I love photographing Twins and it just started from there and another one was a client on a sh that I had no idea she would become one of my best referrals you have to start by seeing what you can do for them first always ask what you can do for them and then just start the conversation I love business friends and it's so fun that you like to take photos of twins because I've done it so many times it is a challenging thing at least for me to do I remember when there were babies one would be happy and the other one wouldn't be happy and i' think oh can you I'm like can you just be happy at the same time the funniest set of pictures where my mom and I were trying to get them both to set up and we had them kind of sitting up in a chair and my daughter who was usually smiling all the time was crying and so my son is smiling which is such the opposite and then he looks over at her she is just crying and he looks at her like why are you crying what's wrong with you and just to see the progression of the pictures is it's so funny but it I remember that day being such a challenge I thought oh I just want a picture magic happens when we focus on the part of our business and ourself that brings us joy what is one way that you make sure to find and live your joy I'm one of four girls and my oldest sister was a photographer and my other my second oldest sister was a small business owner and then I'm a twin and I was I'm determined to do something of my own I'm not going to be a small business owner I'm not going to go in finance I'm not going to do this and then I think I hit a stage of I love photography and I've taken like my MBA is in small business and entrepreneur and marketing like why wouldn't I do that so when you reach a point where you're like I'm going to follow what I love I love photography and I actually love marketing and I love kits and so it was like I was going to combine those and then one of the things that I started as my business and I was growing my mentor coaching business was like I got to figure out how to scale the pricing helping photographers price themselves and run their business business and that was through pixelo for multitude of reasons but what sparks me joy is a few different things I have to remind myself when you get a little bit in the weeds or you get stressed as I have those messages from my photography clients that oh my gosh I love these and send me pictures of them all over their wall even their grandmothers are sending me emails and I'm like okay I've made a little bit of a difference in someone's world they're going to treasure these forever with pixel hell I see people sending me wow I can actually charge profitable rates I can actually balance work and my life with my kids because I was working full-time now I can actually you've proven that I can do this and pay my rent and then you get like people being like Oh my gosh I can pay my rent this month for me that's just I love it that Sparks my joy and that keeps me going I don't know if that I'm my kid my kid she keeps me going that SPS joy in my life I love it keeps me saying I love it thank you for joining us today and for sharing your business knowledge with us you've given us so much to think about and it's Unique because you have the creative side and you have the business side yeah I used to joke I'm left-handed so I think a lot of left-handed people are creative I'm a bit ambidextrous so maybe that's why I have both sides of the brain one of my missions is to be like there doesn't have to be a starving artist like you can be a thriving artist and coming out and help giving the tools to photographers or any creative person that will bring me joy if we can actually appreciate the actual art that people are putting out there in the world so thanks for having me though can you please share with us how and where we can find you and pixelo so pixel's website is pixel.com pic l l o and you can find us at Team pixel on Instagram and my Instagram is J.G Goodrich or my website is Jan goodrich.com thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheil it on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the